


Burn Out the Day

by semperama



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Monster Hunters, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Hunters, Ghosts, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Violence, Partners to Lovers, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 11:08:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10555296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperama/pseuds/semperama
Summary: When Lewis Nixon first teamed up with Dick Winters, it seemed like a perfect fit. In their line of work, it’s good to have someone to watch your back, and Dick is the first person Nix has gotten along with well enough to stick around. But as successful hunts and close calls pile up behind them, Nix starts to wonder: can their good luck can’t possibly hold out? In this never-ending war against monsters and demons and all things that go bump in the night, maybe he should have known better than to get attached to someone he could so easily lose.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to the ever-lovely RC for beta reading and Jersey picking and for all her help and encouragement. Also many thanks to Claudia for being my writing therapist and helping me feel better about this on like a zillion separate occasions! I couldn't have done this without both of them! <33 
> 
> And of course thank you to my lovely artist, Charli, whose work for this fic you can find [here](http://celestial-annihilation.tumblr.com/post/159262953994/illustrations-for-semperamas-big-bang-burn)! I could not have asked for better artwork to go with my fic, and y'all really need to check it out and give it lots of love, because it's GORGEOUS and PERFECT. 
> 
> Just a note: this fic is based on the show Supernatural, but you do not need to have seen it or know anything about it for this fic to make sense. I hope you all enjoy!

Dick looks good like this, wet patches growing under his arms and dirt smeared across his forehead. He cast his flannel aside a while back, and Lewis has appropriated it to cushion his own head against the cold gravestone behind him. The moonlight has washed the red out of Dick’s hair, and yet if Lew stares long enough, he thinks he can see the color in it anyway. Dick either doesn’t mind the staring or doesn’t notice. He just keeps digging, a little furrow of concentration in his brow, as though plunging that shovel into the earth again and again requires any kind of thought at all.

It’s late September, and they’re in upstate Michigan, where the summer has faded away and left the nights crisp and invigorating. Last week they were digging up a body in the Florida panhandle, and both of them had been soaked with sweat and pock-marked with mosquito bites by the time the sun came up. Lew is still a little itchy. He thinks he’d be content if they don’t head south of the Mason-Dixon ever again—except in a couple more weeks he’ll be longing for warm weather and will probably be begging Dick for a quick jaunt down to the Gulf Coast.

“Where do you think you want to head next?” Lew asks. He holds his breath after he says it. Maybe this will be the time Dick tells him it’s time to part ways.

Dick doesn’t look up, but he’s radiating amusement. “How should I know? We go where there’s work.”

“Hmm. What if I told you I had some work for us?”

“You already found something new?” Dick asks, sounding surprised. He pauses his digging and looks up at Lew, his eyes glinting in the weak moonlight.

“Yep.” Lew lets his eyes slide shut, because he doesn’t need to look at Dick for this part. He can picture his expression just fine. Skepticism, sure, but a little spark of excitement underneath it all, because Dick likes to go, move, get shit done. The wicked don’t rest, so neither do they. 

The sound of the shovel starts up again. “Well, are you gonna tell me?” 

“I think I’ll let you wonder a little longer.”

Dick snorts, but before he has a chance to argue, the shovel hits wood with a dull thump. Lew opens his eyes and gets to his feet, stretching, as Dick scrapes the last couple inches of dirt off the top of the coffin.

“Might want to keep an eye open,” Dick says as he grabs the crowbar sitting on the edge of the hole he’s dug and jumps down to pry open the casket. 

Lew grabs the shotgun that was lying next to him in the dirt and scans the graveyard around them, the uneven rows of headstones, most of them so weathered you can barely make out the names. Dick climbs out of the grave, and Lew can hear him salting the bones and drenching them in lighter fluid, then striking a match. He feels the heat from the flames on the back of his neck, and that’s it. They’re all clear. It doesn’t always go this easy, but when it does, it’s a relief.

Dick is rolling his head and rubbing one of his shoulders when Lew turns around. 

“Sore?” Lew asks.

“A little.” Dick looks sideways at him and grins crookedly. “Think you might have done less than your fair share of the digging tonight.”

Lew props the shotgun against his own shoulder and grins back. “I was planning on spelling you, but you looked like you were having so much fun.”

Maybe they’re both getting soft, sharing the work of digging graves, of fighting. But hey, Lew will take it. It’s worth it to have someone to watch your back. Used to be he had to climb down into graves all by himself, leaving his back open to every vengeful spirit in a mile radius. He can afford to be soft now. They both can.

He claps Dick on the shoulder, then walks back over to the grave marker to retrieve Dick’s discarded shirt. Dick takes it from him and ties it around his waist, and they both stand there watching the flames lick at the edge of the grave. This is the part that makes Lew restless, waiting for the fire to die down, listening for the sound of sirens in the distance. More than once they’ve had to make run for it. A couple weeks back, Dick banged the hell out of his shin on a gravestone sprinting away from a nosy deputy, and damn it, if they’re going to get hurt, it shouldn’t be running from a plain old _human being_.

“It’s two college kids in Wisconsin,” Lew says, to fill the silence. When Dick looks at him with eyebrows raised, he adds, “The next job, I mean. A guy and a gal found dead in a locked dorm room. Hearts basically exploded in their chests. No drugs found in their systems.”

“Sounds like our kind of thing,” Dick says.

Lew nods, scuffing his boot in the dirt. _Our_ thing. It’s a novel idea still, that he’s no longer an _I_ or a _me_. Nearly two months of working with Dick, and he still can’t say the idea sits easily in his chest. He keeps waiting for Dick to go up in smoke, like one of the ghosts they salt and burn. But instead they keep having nights like this—easy, companionable nights where they get the job done with more good humor and less fear than should even be possible for guys like them.

“Should we head out in the morning?” Lew asks, and hopes he doesn’t sound as tentative as he feels. The fire is calming down a little, and soon they’ll be able to shovel dirt on it to put it out, then go back to the motel, wash off the sweat and dirt. If Dick’s going to let him down easy, it’d be nice if he’d do it now.

Dick’s mouth twitches. Not quite a smile but close enough to send warmth shooting all the way to the tips of Lew’s chill-numbed fingers. “Sounds good to me, but first—“ He picks up the shovel and hands it over. Their fingers overlap on the handle, and Lew bites the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. “You’re filling in this hole all by yourself.”

Lew lets out a sigh and jerks the shovel out of Dick’s grasp in an insincere show of petulance. “What if we hired someone to do the manual labor for us?”

“With what money?” Dick asks as he walks over and sinks down onto the ground, arranges himself against the headstone in the spot Lew vacated not that long ago. “And how did you ever manage to do this job alone?”

It’s a good question, and one Lew doesn’t have an answer for. So he shrugs and digs the shovel into the mound of dirt beside the grave, and he’s relieved when Dick folds his arms behind his head and looks away, satisfied.

—————

When it’s Dick’s turn to drive, he tunes the radio to one of its extremities, to the mid 80s or the low 100s where it’s all talk radio or jazz or classical music that comes through crackly and quiet. The first few times, Lew had grumbled at him and suggested he pick something less boring, but Dick had just smiled and reminded him of the rules—driver picks the music—and somewhere along the line Lew got used to it. It takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round, he supposes. Not everyone can like the loud stuff. Some people are quiet and don’t mind a little static.

Until now, they didn’t have to argue about the radio. They drove around in a caravan of two, Lew shooting ahead in his best girl—a ‘90 Chevy Camaro, black, which he keeps polished to a high sheen—and Dick puttering behind him in his over-large Ford pickup. Once they started working together regularly, Dick kept suggesting they consolidate to one car, but what he really meant was that Lew should ditch his flashy ride so they could tool around the country in that redneckmobile of his, and no way was that happening. 

It took some convincing, and another week of pointed muttering after the fact, but Dick had eventually let go of the truck. It took another week after that for Lew to let him get behind the wheel, but pragmatism won out in the end. It’s easier to get where you’re going if one person can sleep while the other drives. And Dick’s careful—sometimes too careful, in fact. Lew isn’t worried about him wrecking her.

And bad radio station choices aside, Lew enjoys the time he gets to spend in the passenger seat. Sure, he loves to drive—you don’t have a car like his if you don’t like to drive—but there’s something peaceful about riding shotgun after spending too many years playing captain and helmsman and navigator all at once. Now, he can give Dick a few route options, and Dick will pick the one he likes best and go, only double-checking a turn every now and then. If they wind up at a dead end, it might still be partially Lew’s fault, but once they’re pointed in the right direction again, sometimes Dick will look over at him and say, “Why don’t you take a nap?” and Lew will actually feel safe to do it. He’ll rest his head against the window and close his eyes and be out like a light, only waking when they roll to a stop in the parking lot of whatever flea-bag motel they’re staying in that night.

—————

They’re both already in sour moods when they cross into Wyoming a couple weeks later. Three days in a car rolling past unbroken stretches of prairie is enough to make anyone crazy, even the nigh-unflappable Dick Winters. Dick huffs and sighs through the last fifty miles at least, until Lew is seriously considering socking him one. Instead he pops in a Nirvana CD and cranks it up. That does nothing for Dick’s sighing, but at least Lew can’t hear it anymore.

It’s a doozy of a case. The police reports mention two victims, a man and a woman, both presumed murdered. When Lew and Dick talk to the medical examiner, they find that the woman had a stomach full of glass shards, started coughing them up in the middle of a business lunch and died choking on her own blood before the ambulance could arrive. 

The man is little more than a pile of ash. His wife wasn’t there when it happened. She came home to a smoldering armchair and found her husband’s wedding ring and cell phone amid the cinders. 

“Spontaneous human combustion is a highly controversial idea,” the coroner says. When Lew raises his eyebrow at her, she shrugs. “I just don’t know what could burn a body this fast.”

“And what about the woman?” Dicks asks. 

The coroner looks sideways at them. “What makes you think the two cases are related?”

Lew shares a look with Dick, who fiddles with one of the sleeves with his jacket and clears his throat before answering. “Two strange deaths in the same town inside a week? Can’t just be a coincidence.”

“Someone must have put glass in her food,” the examiner says, “and somehow she didn’t notice until it was too late.”

Everyone in the room knows all that glass couldn’t have made it all the way down to her stomach without her noticing, but no one says it out loud. 

“It’s witches,” Lew says as they exit the morgue. Dick doesn’t argue, but he looks like he wishes he could, and Lew doesn’t blame him. Witches are the worst. 

After a little breaking and entering, they find hex bags in both victims’ houses, and they find the motive too. A slimy motive at that—though that’s hardly surprising. Lew doesn’t think he’s ever met a witch who was an upstanding citizen. They find a couple spellbooks in the nightstand at the female victim’s house, and inside one of the books is a love letter, the paper well-creased and worn from repeated handling. The dead woman’s husband has been cheating on her—with none other than the dead man’s wife. 

“How fucking low can you get?” Lew says, shaking his head, as Dick slams the book shut and puts it back where they found it. 

“Now what?” Dick asks.

Lew tilts his head to the side and reaches around to the small of his back to pull out his gun, pulls the slide back just for show. “What do you mean, now what?”

And that’s how they have their first argument.

It turns out that Dick doesn’t kill witches. It turns out that he’s never killed a human being at all, and when he finds out that Lew has, he looks a little green, which makes Lew wish they’d never picked up this God-forsaken case.

“They killed two people, Dick!” Lew says. They’re back in Lew’s motel room now, trying to hash this out, and Lew keeps thinking maybe this is going to be it, the end of their short-lived partnership. “We can’t just let them walk free!”

“Lots of people kill people.” Dick is sitting on the end of the bed, watching warily as Lew paces back and forth. “Are we going to start going after serial killers too?”

“Maybe we should.” And why not? They’d be doing the world a service.

“I didn’t say we have to let them walk free. We can turn them over to the police.”

Lew scoffs at that. He goes to the bottle of scotch sitting out on the table, the glass with sticky residue in the bottom from the night before, and pours himself a couple fingers. “With what evidence? We can’t exactly say they killed their spouses with magic.”

“We can just give them a tip about the love note. They’ll come up with their own explanation. Cops always do.”

“And you think these scumbags won’t break out of jail first chance they get?” Lew asks.

“They’re amateurs. I doubt they have anything memorized. We’ll burn their books and that’ll be that.”

In the end, Dick lets Lew put the fear of God in them too. They pick over the books and keep the best for themselves, then have a bonfire for the rest in the woman’s backyard. As the flames spit at the night sky, Lew turns to them both and tells them if he hears word they’ve fled from the law, he’ll come back and put bullets through their skulls. Dick stands silently by, hands in his pockets, shoulders preternaturally straight. 

When they get in the car and drive away, he doesn’t look at Lew for miles and miles.

—————

Lew’s mother left his father when he was ten years old. She eventually got tired of all of it—the long trips away, the drinking, the salt lines she had to pour in front of the doors every night. One day she just disappeared, taking with her the only chance Lew and Blanche had at a normal life. Lew wishes he could say he doesn’t blame her, but he does.

He wonders if he’ll blame Dick too, when he goes.

—————

They get stuck in the doldrums after a case in northern California. The news isn’t turning up anything that smells fishy, so they have no pressing business and no pressing desire to drive for the hell of it.

That’s when Dick first suggests they share a room.

“It just makes good sense,” he says. “Why keep getting two rooms when we could just get a double? We end up spending most of our time in one room anyway.”

Lew has to admit he has a point. When they’re in the middle of a job, they usually set up camp in Lew’s room. Dick claims the table and does his research thing on the laptop, while Lew reclines on the bed and reads books and newspapers and, if he’s feeling desperate, his father’s notes. It’s easier when they’re together, so they can ask each other questions and talk over bits of lore whenever the need arises. Most nights they only separate when it’s time to sleep, and some nights Lew passes out in bed with Dick still clacking away at the laptop. So why not save the money? It’s not like they’re rolling in it anyway.

Still, Lew balks. The idea makes him itch in places he can’t scratch, makes the hair on the back of his next stand up like he just set foot in a haunted house. “If you’re worried about finances, there are ways to scrape together more money.”

Dick gives him an unimpressed look. “I’m just saying, it would save us some trouble.”

This is all going to blow up in his face eventually, Lew thinks. They’ve left the incident with the witches in the rearview, but he’s sure more problems will pop up in the future. Worse problems. Still, maybe he should just enjoy it while he can. 

So that night, he wanders up to the main office and asks if there are any rooms with two beds available. The clerk just nods and pokes her finger at the laminated map on the counter, indicating the room next to the one Dick currently occupies. 

“Great,” Lew says flatly. He plunks down enough cash for one more night, hopefully the last night they’ll have to spend here. “Can you check us out of the ones we’ve got and check us into that one?”

It’s not so awkward at first. It feels like any other night, with Dick checking the internet for new cases and Lew sitting on one of the beds, channel surfing. He watches the local news for a little while, just in case, then jabs at the remote until he lands on a station showing _Three’s Company_ reruns. As he toes off his shoes, he thinks about getting up and getting his scotch out of his bag, but it seems too far away. 

He must doze off, because he wakes with a jolt when the laptop lid clicks shut. His hand is reaching for the knife under his pillow by the time he realizes where he is and what the noise was. Dick is standing at the foot of Lew’s bed, caught like a deer in the headlights.

“Sorry,” Dick says. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Lew scrubs a hand across his face. He looks at the clock. Nearly midnight. “You turning in now?”

“Yeah. You can keep the TV on if you want.”

Lew shakes his head and picks up the remote, clicks the power button. The television crackles into silence. His heart is still going a mile a minute, but it’ll settle soon, if he stops thinking about it. If he stops thinking about how strange this feels. 

“You need the bathroom?” Dick asks.

“No, you go ahead.”

Dick goes to his bag and gets out his shaving kit and disappears into the bathroom. The water runs, and Lew listens to the sound of Dick brushing his teeth and tries to be comforted by it. He thinks about when he was a kid on the road with his dad and his sister, and he and Blanche used to squabble over who got the bathroom first, not because either of them really cared, but because it felt good to pick a fight with something that didn’t actually want to kill you. He should call her, he thinks, his chest suddenly tight with emotion. He should make sure she’s doing okay. 

That night he lies awake for too long, still listening, this time to the quiet and steady way Dick breathes. He doesn’t want to fall asleep himself and miss it. Years and years of sleeping alone, with only road noise to keep him company, and now Dick is here, a few feet away, just breathing.

He shouldn’t get used to it. He’s gotten used to working with Dick, to riding in a car with him, to the careful way he takes his first sip of coffee in the morning, but this, the way he sounds when he’s sleeping, is not for Lew to get used to. _Can’t_ be.

Things like this can’t last, not in their line of work. So he lies awake and listens while he can.

—————

“I found something, but you aren’t going to like it,” Dick says as soon as Lew steps into the room, juggling coffee cups and greasy paper sacks. Lew sets Dick’s breakfast in front of him and tries to rein in his interest. If Dick says he won’t like it, chances are he _really_ won’t like it.

He takes a seat across from Dick at the table and pulls a sausage biscuit out of his own bag. “Well, out with it.”

“The Jersey Devil.”

Lew should have waited to take a bite. He chokes and hacks until Dick looks like he’s about to get up from his chair to help, but Lew waves a hand at him and finally dissolves into laughter, his hand slapping the table.

“The Jersey Devil? You can’t be serious.”

“Come on, Nix, I think—”

“Take it from a native,” Lew interrupts. “That’s one urban legend that’s really all legend.”

“Just hear me out,” Dick says. He hasn’t bothered to even look at his breakfast yet. He has that stubborn twinkle in his eye that makes Lew feel like he might have lost this argument before it started. “There’ve been four supposed sightings in the last week, and they were all near the same town. Hammonton.”

Lew sighs and wipes his fingers idly on the topmost of a stack of napkins. “That’s how these things work, Dick,” he says. “Trust me, my dad and I responded to more than enough false alarms. It always ends up being an owl, or a weird-shaped tree branch, or the wind, or all of the above.”

“One man claims it killed his cat and left it on the roof.”

“Yep, sounds like an owl to me,” Lew says. He picks up his biscuit again. 

“We’ve driven across the country for less,” Dick says. 

Lew huffs and stares at the soggy breakfast sandwich in his hands, hoping against hope that the next words out of Dick’s mouth won’t be— 

“Do you have a different job lined up for us?”

“Okay, _fine_ ,” Lew snaps, but he’s covering up the fact that he wants to laugh again, only this time uneasily, embarrassed by how quickly and efficiently Dick backed him into a corner. “We can go check it out. But I’m telling you, it’s a waste of time.”

Dick shrugs. “We’ve got time.”

Yes, Lew supposes they do. Who knows how many years, and the road unwinding endlessly ahead. And lately, he can’t stop wondering how many of those years they’ll spend together. 

He shakes his head and forces his thoughts back to the present, to the job, to Jersey. No use thinking about the future when Dick is hell-bent on dragging him back toward his past. He just hopes he can make it in and out of the state without running into his dad.

“Anyway, I was thinking,” Dick says, finally digging into his bag and unearthing his hash browns, “maybe we could stop in and see your dad.”

Lew fights harder against that one, and in the end he convinces Dick that a family reunion is a bad idea, but when they get on the road later that day, he still feels uneasy. He insists on driving the whole way, even after a headache starts forming at the base of his skull and his shoulders ache from holding them too stiffly. Every time he shifts in his seat, he expects Dick to say something, but Dick doesn’t speak a word until they cross into Pennsylvania, and then it’s only to ask if they can stop at a diner he likes.

They find a motel in Hammonton, which is a charming little town just like all the other charming little towns in the Northeast, full of colonial houses and gnarled trees and old brick storefronts. Lew pulls into the parking lot of the first motel he sees, and Dick goes in and gets them a room, comes back with two keys and news that two more people have claimed to see the Devil in the past couple days.

“What’d you do, sweet talk the front desk clerk?” Lew asks.

“I said we were tourists with an interest in cryptids.” Dick blushes a little as he says it, and Lew wonders what else the clerk might have assumed about them, two men traveling together, getting a room together. They’ve been bunking together for a couple weeks now, but this is the first time he realizes how it must look.

“That’s not a bad cover actually,” Lew says, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel as he drives them down to the other end of the parking lot and their room. “I was thinking we could pretend to be animal control this time around, but maybe people will be more eager to talk to us if we pretend we’re writing a book or something.”

So they leave their fake animal control credentials behind, drop their stuff off in the room, and set off to interrogate the witnesses. Four hours later, when it’s closing in on dusk, they’ve talked to three out of the six, and Lew is still convinced they’re after an owl or an eagle. A few dead pets and weird sounds in the forest are hardly evidence of anything supernatural.

“I say let’s just head out into the woods tonight to have a look for ourselves,” Lew says once they’re back in the car. That’s where they’ll end up anyway, so he’d rather bypass the part where they have to interact with more ignorant people. 

“Do you even know how to kill it if we find it?” Dick asks.

“Silver bullet.” He clears his throat. “Probably.”

“Probably?”

“Well, that’s the thing. What _is_ it? The legend says it’s a child of the devil and a human mother, and that it transformed into some half-bat, half-goat combo after it was born, but we know _that’s_ not possible. So is it a ghost? Vengeful spirit of a child born to a superstitious mother who had it killed? Or is it some kind of shapeshifter?”

He glances sideways at Dick and sees him staring at the dash, frowning to himself, worrying his lip with his teeth. “So if we don’t know how to kill it…”

“I’m telling you, it doesn’t exist. Have you heard of any other half-bat half-goats flying around? Do you think Lucifer is out there making babies?” Lew starts the car and pulls away from the curb, his foot coming down a little harder on the gas than is strictly necessary. “We’re going to end up wasting a silver bullet on a fucking raptor.”

They can’t leave before checking it out though; even Lew has to admit that. So after dinner, they drive to the outskirts of town, park on the shoulder, and set out into the woods, pistols loaded with silver and tucked against the smalls of their backs. Dick brought the shotgun and plenty of rock salt, just in case this thing is a spirit after all, and Lew lets him walk ahead, though he isn’t happy about it. These woods aren’t as familiar to him as the ones closer to home would be, but he still feels like he should be playing tour guide. Or at least protector. Like he’s invited Dick into his home and now feels responsible for him.

These woods aren’t as familiar to him, but they still give him an uncomfortable, nostalgic feeling. He got used to traipsing along in someone’s footsteps a long time ago, when he was following his father, usually laden down with supplies like a pack mule. Stanhope was ruthless. While most parents soothe away their children’s nightmares, Lew’s father made sure he knew that those nightmares were real, and he would be smart to fear them. He had Lew and Blanche sparring with each other as soon as they were old enough to swing their fists, and he put guns in their hands not too long after that. Lew killed his first werewolf in woods not unlike these when he was just thirteen years old. After the beast fell into a heap on the forest floor, a neat bullet hole through its head, he had rounded on his father with a broad grin expecting praise, but Stanhope had already turned his back and started back for the car. 

This night is not like that night, and Dick is about as far from Lew’s father as a human being can get, but it still makes Lew feel small and bumbling, being here. He has to focus to avoid tripping over roots or his own feet. He finds himself staring at the back of Dick’s neck and taking comfort in it. Dick is strong. Dick is calm. Dick doesn’t chide him when he makes a misstep, and he never looks disappointed, not even when Lew gets snappish with him.

Lew is so lost in thought that when Dick stops short, he almost runs into the back of him.

“Shh,” Dick says, pivoting to put a hand on Lew’s chest. “Do you hear that?”

He holds his breath, strains his ears. There it is. Shuffling. The crunch of leaves, of twigs. Something is moving through the forest toward them—not quickly, but quick enough that they can’t do much but stay where they are. If they can hear it, chances are it can hear them. 

Night has fallen, and even by the light of the moon Lew can’t see very far into the trees around them. It’s too dark, and that sound is getting closer. He and Dick both have flashlights on their belts, but when he reaches for his, Dick’s hand clamps down on his wrist, his grip tight enough to hurt.

“Wait,” he says under his breath. His hand goes to Lew’s shoulder, fingers digging into the muscle. “Just wait.”

“Dick,” Lew hisses.

“Lew, I think it’s human.”

That’s no comfort, not in this job. Human could mean zombie. It could mean revenant. It could mean something wearing human skin, like a demon or a rogue angel or some ancient pagan god that wants to eat their flesh right off their bones. He knows he has to trust Dick, but that doesn’t stop him from reaching back and resting his hand on the butt of his gun, ready to blow away whatever comes through those trees. 

“Hello?” Dick calls. Lew winces and pulls his gun out, raises it to eye level. If Dick’s going to go shouting at potential foes, Lew can at least have him covered.

A shadow steps out of the trees a moment later, and the first thing Lew sees is the glint of a gun. 

“Stop,” Dick says.

“Don’t come any closer,” Lew adds.

“Lewis?” says the shadow.

Lew takes two deep breaths, in and out, in and out, trying to clear his head. Of course. Of course this would be just his luck. “Dad?”

They both lower their guns at the same time. Lew shoots an accusatory look at Dick, as if he somehow could have found Stanhope and dragged him here himself, but Dick shrugs and shakes his head, and Lew feels his shoulders slump. 

“What are you doing here?” Lew asks his father, though he already knows the answer.

“You think I wouldn’t investigate something like this, this close to home?” Stanhope says, stepping closer so they can finally see his face.

The world is small. New Jersey is smaller. Lew wishes he’d tried harder to talk Dick out of coming.

He has to make the best out of a bad situation, so he makes quick introductions, glossing over the fact that he’s been working with Dick for months now. No reason to elicit any unnecessary eyebrow raises from his father.

“It’s a tulpa,” Stanhope says abruptly, almost as soon as Lew has given him Dick’s name. It’s always business with him. Never pleasantries. Never a _’How are you doing?’_ Then again, they _are_ standing in the middle of a forest in the dark; maybe now’s not the time for small talk anyway.

“A tulpa?” Dick asks.

“It’s a kind of thoughtform,” Stanhope explains, but his eyes are on Lew. _’You should have known this,’_ is what he’s really saying. “Usually tied to an object of some kind. The idea is that if someone meditates on something hard enough, they can make it real. In this case, the town has had a surge of Jersey Devil-related superstition recently, and their collective belief has fueled the tulpa.”

Dick nods, taking it all in stride. “So how do we kill it?”

“Destroy the object or creature it’s tied to,” Lew says blandly. He knows it’s too late to gain back any brownie points with his father, but the words roll off his tongue anyway.

“Pretty sure I’ve got it figured,” Stanhope says. “Something, probably an owl, made off with the first witness’s daughter’s pet rabbit. He must have started speculating it was the Devil, told all his neighbors, and it spiraled from there.”

“So it’s an owl that transformed?” Dick asks.

Stanhope nods. “That’s my theory.”

“Then all we have to do is find it and put a bullet in it.” Lew releases the magazine on his gun to double-check that it’s full, not because he needs to but because it gives him something to do with his hands, something to look at aside from his father’s face. “Should we split up? It’s a lot of woods to cover.” He tells himself his brusqueness has nothing to do with not wanting to hunt at his father’s side again. He tells himself Stanhope doesn’t have that power over him anymore.

But after they all agree that’s the best course of action, Dick goes off in his own direction too, and Lew can’t ignore the ping of disquiet in in his chest as he watches him disappear into the dark. Lew stands there frowning for a moment, listening until he can’t hear Dick’s footfalls anymore, then heads off in the opposite direction.

Knowing his dad isn’t far away puts him on edge—more so than the soft hoots overhead that have him aiming fruitlessly up into the trees, waiting for a great black beast to swoop down out of the darkness. It’s been almost ten years since he and Stanhope went their separate ways, and even though they still see each other every now and then—usually in circumstances like these—Lew steers clear when he can. He was almost twenty when he ran off on his own, young still but old enough to know that his father had very little humanity left in him. Old enough to know he was going to wind up dead if he stayed, either because he pushed himself too hard or because he just gave up altogether.

Given that Stanhope is his only example of what it’s like to have a partner in this business, it’s no wonder he keeps waiting for things to blow up with Dick. Relationships don’t last for hunters—not even blood relationships, much less whatever it is he and Dick have. Someone will leave or someone will die. No road available to them leads to a happy ending.

As if to prove his point, the sound of a gunshot jolts Lew from his thoughts. 

He has no idea how long he’s been walking, how far away he is from Dick and his dad, but instinct takes over. He turns and sprints in the direction of the noise, dodging his way around trees and jumping over fallen logs. Another shot rings out, and then the sound of yelling. Lew picks up his pace, nearly tripping over a tree root. He clips his shoulder on an outstretched branch and hisses in pain. His heart is lodged in his throat. He’s not sure what he’s running toward, what he might see when he gets where he’s going, but he doesn’t want to think about that now, doesn’t have time to anyway. 

When he comes upon Dick and his father squatting beside a dark figure on the ground, he almost trips right over them, skidding a little in the thick carpet of leaves and fallen pine needles. Dick looks up at him, his face so pale it almost seems to shine in the moonlight. So pale he looks like a ghost, and Lew doubles over in his haste to get his hands on Dick’s shoulders, the back of his neck, to feel him warm and solid and definitely alive.

“We got it,” Dick says breathlessly. He lifts a hand like he’s going to intercept one of Lew’s, but Lew’s brain finally catches up with him and he straightens up, reels backward and sneaks a glance at his father to make sure he didn’t witness that moment of weakness.

But Stanhope is not paying attention. He’s still staring at the ground, his jaw working. “Dick got it. Damn thing almost took my head off.”

Dick clears his throat and wipes his hands on his jeans. “Pretty sure I wouldn’t have hit it if you hadn’t winged it first.”

Lew looks back and forth between them incredulously, then squints through the dark at the thing on the ground. Inky black, with curved horns jutting from the top of its goatlike head and two great wings sprouting from its shoulders. Its hind legs have cloven hooves, and its tail is forked at the end. It’s hideous, a nightmarish smudge against the ground, all Lew’s childhood nightmares in corporeal form. He shudders and takes an instinctive step back. 

“Let’s burn it and get the hell out of here,” he says. 

The thing gives off a smell like sulphur when they set it alight, so all of them stand there with their sleeves held across their faces as they watch it burn. Lew keeps thinking it’ll turn back into an owl at some point, but it never does. It burns down to black, oily embers, which they kick dirt over and stamp out until they’re sure they won’t accidentally set the forest ablaze. 

On the walk back to the road, Stanhope asks Dick all about himself. Where he’s from, how long he’s been hunting, what got him into it. Every answer makes Lew grit his teeth a little harder, certain that his father is judging every word out of Dick’s mouth and measuring it against his impossible standards. Dick may have just saved Stanhope’s life, but that’ll make no difference. Especially since Dick’s been dumb enough to take up with Lew. He’s lost this game before he’s even begun.

When they finally catch sight of the car, Dick walks ahead—damn his long legs—leaving Lew standing there at the edge of the woods with his father, which is exactly where he didn’t want to be.

“Have you heard from your sister?” Stanhope asks.

Lew rolls his eyes. “Yeah, we talk. She ran into some ghouls in Connecticut last week.”

“Didn’t have trouble, I hope.”

“She never has trouble,” Lew says.

They stand there in silence for a few strained moments, staring off in opposite directions. Lew wonders if he’s supposed to say something here. An apology for not staying in touch. An assurance that he’ll do better in the future. But neither of those things will be coming out of his mouth, so if Stanhope is waiting for them, he can keep waiting.

“Look, I should—” he starts, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the car, where Dick is throwing their supplies into the trunk.

“You like working with him?” Stanhope asks with a jerk of his chin.

It’s a loaded question. Lew would be smart to walk away. Instead he meets his father’s eyes and says, “Yeah, I do.”

In the dark, it’s hard to make out what lurks in the depths of his father’s eyes, but it seems almost like pity.

“If you’re smart,” he says, “you won’t get attached.”

—————

For the next two weeks, Dick doesn’t mention their run-in with Stanhope, but Lew can feel him working up to it. He can see the way Dick looks at him, sneaking searching glances when he thinks Lew isn’t paying attention. They work two more cases—an easy haunting in North Carolina and a couple werewolves in Missouri—and still Dick doesn’t say anything. It’s hanging over them like a cloud, and Lew starts to wish they could get it over with and move on. He almost starts the conversation himself a few times but gives up when he realizes he doesn’t know what to say.

They pull into a little diner the night after the werewolves, when they’re both still tired and sore and haven’t even started to look at where to head next. It’s a tiny place on the side of the highway, the kind with lots of windows facing the road, just a handful of tables on the inside, chips in the formica, cracks in all the vinyl booths. There are a thousand like it, some in every state, and they feel like home to Lew. The smell of coffee and pie and bacon grease bring him almost as much comfort as being behind the wheel of his car with the open road stretching out ahead of him.

It was at a diner like this that he and Dick had their first real conversation. They’d met when they both showed up to the same haunted gas station in middle-of-nowhere Kansas in the middle of the night, and it was just practical to finish the hunt together. When it was all over, Dick asked Lew if he wanted to get some coffee, and Lew said coffee sounded fucking fantastic. They’d traded stories and tips, talked the same kind of shop talk that hunters always do when they cross paths, and Lew was sure they’d go their separate ways at the end of it, probably never speak to each other again. But after the bill was paid, Dick leaned forward and said he’d heard there might be a rugaru in Birmingham and asked Lew if he wanted to come with him to check it out. 

All these months later, this is still how it goes. Finish the hunt, fuel up, talk about where to next. It’s become their routine, and Lew is more comforted by it than he’ll ever admit out loud.

It’s not quite so comforting on this particular night. They order coffee and sandwiches, and Lew thinks about reaching for the flask in the pocket of his jacket but hesitates when he sees the contemplative expression on Dick’s face. _Here it comes_ , he thinks.

“Hey, Nix,” Dick says, as if Lew’s attention isn’t already on him. He goes so far as to wait for Lew to make an inquisitive sound before he goes on. “You never told me why it was you stopped working with your dad.”

Lew grins. He can’t help it. Dick isn’t even trying to be guileless, but somehow he comes across that way all the same. “I didn’t, did I?” he teases. “Terrible oversight on my part.”

Dick rolls his eyes but says nothing. He’s good at this, at waiting Lew out, refusing to be distracted by jokes and sarcasm. Lew sighs and leans back in the booth and reaches for his flask after all.

“You liked him?” Lew asks. “My father?”

“I thought he was alright,” Dick says with a shrug. “He knows his stuff. Seems like you would have been safer sticking together.”

“Safer isn’t everything.” Lew tips some whiskey into his coffee, then slips the flask back into his jacket before the waitress can come by and give him the stink eye. “What was your relationship with your dad like?”

Dick thinks about that for a second, his eyes flicking toward the ceiling. “Shallow,” he says. “When I was younger, I thought he worked too hard to have much energy for things like playing and talking. Then I grew up and realized he’s withdrawn with everyone. He’s a hard man to get close to.”

Lew nods, stretches his arm across the back of the booth, and looks out the window, hiding from Dick’s scrutiny. “I was close to my dad, but by force, not by choice.” It feels weird to say that out loud, but he narrows his eyes at the trees across the road and makes himself go on. “We were groomed for all this from a young age. Didn’t have any choice but to go into hunting, and never were asked if we wanted to do anything else. I always know what he’s thinking, because he always _says_ what he’s thinking, whether it’s good, bad, or ugly. And it’s usually the latter.” He shifts uncomfortably and clears his throat. “Even now, I don’t know how much of the voice inside my head is his and how much is mine. I had to get away before I stopped feeling like a person altogether. Before I started feeling like just an extension of him.”

As he falls silent, he can feel the back of his neck burning in embarrassment, but when he dares to meet Dick’s eyes again, he finds only sympathy there.

“Do you feel like a person now?” Dick asks. The sincerity of the question makes Lew’s chest feel tight and sends that flush all the way up to his cheeks.

“I’m not sure,” he says, shocking himself with his own honesty. “I’m still not sure why I do this some days.”

Dick’s hand twitches on the table top, and for one breathless moment Lew thinks he’s going to reach out to him—like he almost did in those woods in Jersey with Lew’s father standing by. But he doesn’t. He goes still again, looking suddenly self-conscious.

“You do it because it’s the right thing to do,” he says.

Lew snorts and reaches for his coffee, desperate for the whiskey to go ahead and do the work of fuzzing his emotions. “You sound so sure.”

He expects Dick to back down, to look away or shrug or soften the moment with a joke, but instead he holds Lew’s gaze, his expression serious and full of enough warmth that Lew almost doesn’t believe what he’s seeing.

“I am sure,” Dick says. His hand has curled into a fist on the tabletop. “I am.”

—————

There are two kinds of hunters in the world: the ones who are born into it, like Lew, and the ones who stumble across it later in life, like Dick. Normally the newer ones have stories of tragedy, of loved ones killed—or worse—by creatures straight out of their nightmares, but Dick is one of the lucky ones. A werewolf would have ripped his sister’s heart out if a hunter hadn’t arrived in the nick of time with steady aim and a silver bullet. That hunter was Ron Speirs.

The way Dick tells it, he practically begged Ron to teach him to hunt. He, like so many others, couldn’t keep living a normal life once he learned monsters were real, and he wanted to do his part to help. It’s hard for Lew to imagine Ron taking him under his wing though. Ron is notorious, known throughout the hunter community for an effectiveness that borders on ruthlessness. Stories about him make their way through the grapevine, some of them plausible and some of them clearly embellished. They say he once took out a whole pack of werewolves on his own. They say demons are afraid of him and will smoke out of their meatsuits rather than face whatever torture he has in store. 

So it’s hard to believe he is the one who trained Dick. Dick, who won’t even kill a murderous witch. Who never puts a monster down unless he’s sure they’ve killed or mean to kill. Lew supposes that’s why Dick and Ron split up eventually, but of course Dick is too good a guy to say so. He doesn’t have a single bad thing to say about Ron, in fact; and when Ron calls him up and says he needs help with a nest of vampires, he and Lew head that way without hesitation.

The nest is in Chicago, and Ron has been trying to track it down for a while. They’re smart, making their kills look like run-of-the-mill murders and preying on victims that the justice system doesn’t pay much attention to anyway. Dick looks angry the whole time he’s filling Lew in on the details, and Lew gets it. Sometimes the monsters that operate on animal instinct are actually a relief. When the supernatural starts mirroring the darkest parts of humanity, that’s when the job gets depressing.

When they get to Chicago, they find that Ron hasn’t been working alone as of late. He’s found a partner in Carwood Lipton, who introduces himself to Lew and Dick with a subdued but genuine smile and a firm handshake. He has a scar on his face that makes him look a little menacing, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that he’s a kind-hearted man, almost gentle. Maybe Ron has a type, Lew thinks. But then he catches Ron looking at Carwood with soft eyes and putting a hand on the small of his back when he passes, and he suddenly has even more to wonder about. 

It’ll be four of them against ten vampires, but Lew’s seen worse odds.

They spend two nights doing reconnaissance. Ron has tracked the nest to a warehouse on the outskirts of town, and the four of them stake it out so they can get a feel for the inhabitants’ comings and goings. The vampires only hunt at night, of course, but unfortunately they don’t all seem to sleep during the day, instead taking shifts so as many as five of them are awake at a time. So it isn’t going to be easy. This won’t be a case where they slip in, kill them all in their sleep, and slip out again.

“I say we just go in and get it done,” Ron says when they sit down to plan it all out. “We each take two or three of them. It’ll be easy.”

“Nothing is ever that easy,” says Dick. When Lew raises an eyebrow at him in silent question, he sighs. “What? It isn’t. We need to plan for every outcome.”

“Dick’s right,” Carwood says. That pretty much settles the issue. Ron sets his jaw but doesn’t argue. Lew draws a map of the warehouse on the motel stationery, and the other three jab fingers at it and talk over each other until they’ve finally got a plan that seems workable. Once Dick is satisfied that it’s about as airtight as it’s going to get, they turn in for the night with the intent of making their move the next day.

On paper, it seems simple. In and out, home by lunch. Lew stills lays awake that night, worrying. It’s easier when it’s just him and Dick, and Lew can be confident they’ll have each other’s backs no matter what. The more people in the mix, the more unpredictable things get.

They send Carwood in first as bait. He plays it like he’s lost and clueless, a tasty morsel wandering right into the middle of the lion’s den. The rest of them wait just out of sight, and they can hear him yelling, “Hello?” into the echoing dark until he stops at the place they decided on with their sketched-out map. The vampires bunk in a smaller interior room where there isn’t much space to fight and their way out could easily get blocked. The goal is to draw them into the larger anterior room where they can move around and beat a hasty retreat if need be. And if they’re lucky, Carwood will be able to kill a couple of them as they trickle through the doorway.

That’s how it _should_ go, and it does go that way for a little while. Carwood unsheathes his machete and beheads the first vampire before he even knows what’s coming, but he has to fall back then, because the next three come out of the door together. Ron, Dick, and Lew rush to help him. 

Ron is every bit the fighter he’s been made out to be. He runs into the fight like he has no fear and ends up cornering two of the vamps in the corner of the room. Lew finds himself facing down two more, and he dances out of their reach for a while, trying to figure out which to lunge at first. He can hear the sound of the others’ machetes slicing through the air, occasionally hitting flesh and drawing enraged snarls out of the blood-suckers. A head hits the ground with an unmistakable thud, and then another rolls into Lew’s boot. The two he’s facing are distracted long enough for him to dart forward and decapitate one. Its lifeless body slumps to the floor. Its partner darts backward into the darkness.

That’s when Lew realizes he has no idea where Dick is. When he looks up, he sees Carwood sprinting over to help Ron, but Dick is not with them. And there are still three vamps unaccounted for.

“Dick?” Lew yells into the darkness. _Stupid_ , he thinks. _Stupid._ But then there’s a grunt and a cry from behind Lew, back toward the outside door, and Lew turns and runs in that direction before he even has time to think of using caution.

Two vampires have Dick pinned up against the wall. He’s holding them off with his machete, the blade digging into the shoulder of one, black blood dripping onto Dick’s hands and pooling under his feet so he’s starting to slip in it. The other vamp is snapping at his face. Its jagged shark teeth gleam with saliva, and with each lunge it gets half an inch closer to ripping Dick’s throat out. Dick’s arms are trembling with the strain. Lew is paralyzed, certain he’s about to witness his friend’s death and certain there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

Then Dick’s eyes meet his, and Lew sees relief there. Suddenly, he can move again.

He yells “Duck!” when he’s almost to Dick’s side, and Dick drops to his knees just in time for Lew to swing his knife and slice cleanly through the neck of the vamp that was about to rip into Dick’s neck. Black blood sprays the wall as Lew brings his knife around for the second one, and a second head hits the ground.

“What—“ Lew starts, breathing hard, but Dick is springing back to his feet and shouldering him out of the way so hard that he hits the wall. He looks around just in time to see Dick take off the head of a third vampire, the one that had run away earlier, who evidently had been hoping to catch Lew unawares. Dick’s knife swings through the air in a quick, graceful arc, and then it’s over.

“Dick,” Lew rasps. His knife clatters to the floor and he takes two lurching steps forward, catching Dick’s wrists in his hands. His fingers slip-slide through the inky, viscous vampire blood that coats Dick’s skin to his elbows. Dick has blood smeared across his face, so close to his lips. “Please tell me you didn’t—“

“I’m fine.” Dick’s voice is shaking. He isn’t trying to pull his arms from Lew’s grasp. “I…I’m fine. It didn’t get in my mouth.”

Lew wants to haul Dick in and hold him close until his heart migrates out of his throat and back down into his chest where it belongs. He wants to collapse against him in relief.

But he doesn’t get the chance to do either, because Ron and Carwood come sprinting out of the dark, both their faces spackled with blood and concern.

“We get ‘em all?” Ron asks.

All Lew can do is nod. It’s a few more moments before he can bring himself to let go of Dick.

That night, the four of them go out, and Lew gets rip-roaring drunk. Ron matches him almost drink for drink, but he holds his liquor more gracefully, his body going boneless and his smiles coming easier and his gaze fixing on Carwood more often than not. Lew envies him. Stanhope would probably be happy to have Ron Speirs for a son. He wonders why Ron and Dick ever split up, and whether Dick would be happier hunting with him again.

It shows just how drunk he is that he asks as much when they’re staggering out of the bar, his arm thrown over Dick’s shoulder.

“Ron and I didn’t work well together,” Dick says. “You and I are a better fit.”

Lew tries to shake his head, but it makes the ground tilt too violently, so he stops. “I find that hard to believe,” he slurs instead. “I almost got you killed.”

“ _I_ almost got me killed. You saved my life.”

But all Lew can think about is how it felt like his feet were stuck in cement when he saw Dick pinned to that wall. Or how he never should have lost track of Dick in the first place. He was afraid, more afraid than he’s ever been, and fear almost cost him more than he can afford to give up. How did Dick get to be so important to him without his say-so?

They say goodbye to Ron and Carwood in the parking lot of the bar. Lew is surprised when both of them clap him on the shoulder and credit him with a job well done. They do the same for Dick, but Dick ducks his head and clenches his jaw, clearly still annoyed with himself for what happened in the warehouse. _”We’ve all had moments like that,”_ Carwood had said back in the bar. _”That’s why it’s best not to do this job alone.”_ But Dick will stew for a few days at least, Lew knows. He always expects himself to be perfect, even though he has no trouble overlooking a multitude of sins in others. 

“You ever need help—with anything—just let us know,” Ron says. He gives Dick’s shoulder another squeeze, and Lew has to look away. 

“Will do,” Dick says. Lew’s mind is working too slow to argue, and anyway, if he was more sober he’d probably chastise himself for wanting to reject such a kindness. They are all allies in this fight. 

Dick deposits Lew in the passenger seat and grips his shoulder while he buckles him in, his breath warm on the side of Lew’s face.

“I can do it,” Lew insists, but it’s too late. Dick is chuckling and closing the door.

As they pull out of the lot, Lew glances in the side mirror and sees that Ron has Carwood pressed against the side of their Jeep, Carwood’s face cradled in his hands, kissing him soundly.

—————

When his father told him not to get attached, Lew assumed it was some form of sour grapes. _Hope he runs off like you did, gives you a taste of your own medicine._ But no, Stanhope might have been making sense for once.

In the aftermath of Chicago, Lew can’t pretend he’s not attached already—and to someone that fights monsters at his side every day, and as such has a high probability of eventually dying in his arms. Or hey, maybe he’ll get lucky. Maybe he’ll be the one dying in Dick’s arms. It isn’t long before the universe threatens to grant him the latter.

They’re in a graveyard in rural Illinois. Dick is just handing the shovel to Lew for his turn at digging when the damn thing comes out of nowhere, bowling into Lew with enough force to almost knock him into the grave. He doesn’t get a good look before pain like fire blooms on his thigh, like someone shoved hot coals under his skin. He cries out and doubles over, and the heat spreads down his leg. It feels like someone is slicing at his shin with a hot knife. He’s being cut to ribbons, he knows it, his flesh torn from his bones. His hands swipe at the air and hit nothing. Where’s Dick? Where’s—

The bark of a shotgun sets his ears ringing, and he claps his hands over them and cries out. It hurts, it hurts everywhere now, from his stomach to the tips of his toes, and black is edging in around his vision. _Don’t pass out_ , he thinks. _Not until—_

He wakes up under harsh yellow lights that make his head throb. It’s cold—the air isn’t cold, but he feels ice seeping through his clothes nevertheless. Porcelain, his brain supplies. He’s in the empty bathtub, in the motel bathroom. 

_Dick._ He means to push the word out through his mouth, but a groan comes out instead. 

“Shh.” It’s Dick’s voice. Frigid fingers touch his forehead, and Lew tries and fails to turn his head toward the touch. “I was hoping you wouldn’t come to yet. This is going to hurt.”

Lew barely registers the acrid smell of alcohol before the hot coals are back. He opens his mouth to yell, but then Dick’s hand is there, muffling his cries, keeping the neighbors from hearing them. 

“Sorry,” Dick hisses. He sounds like he truly means it. “I’m sorry, but I have to.” 

The alcohol runs over the wounds in Lew’s leg like molten metal. It would be kinder to chop the fucking thing off, and Lew would tell Dick so if he wasn’t so busy yelling into the palm of Dick’s hand. Dick’s skin smells coppery, like blood. Lew’s eyes roll in his head, searching for Dick’s face, but all he can see is white light and black spots.

“Dick.” This time Lew succeeds in saying it, just as Dick’s had moves away. “What—“

“Hush now,” Dick says. “Just for now. Let me patch you up.”

Dick has cut his jeans away, he realizes. His favorite pair of jeans. Now he’s cold and it hurts and he feels his body quaking uncontrollably. The black spots are growing, choking out the light.

“Dick,” he pleads.

This time, when Dick speaks, his voice is very close, his breath on the side of Lew’s face. “It’s alright, Lew,” he murmurs. His words are like slipping into a warm bath, like a cozy blanket to wrap up in. “It’s okay. You can go back to sleep now.”

It feels like a long time before he claws his way toward consciousness again. His dreams are vivid and strange, full of wolves and flickering tongues of fire and skies as red as blood. He thinks he hears Dick’s voice calling to him from far away, but when he moves toward it, it recedes further into the distance, or starts coming from the opposite direction, until he feels like he’s running in endless circles. 

But eventually he finds it. It feels like months have passed, but the voice gets closer, closer, until he can sense light behind his eyelids and can hear Dick right next to him, speaking as evenly as a metronome. He’s reading, Lew realizes. From the Bible, it sounds like. _The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey…_

“Is this supposed to be comforting?” Lew’s voice sounds like a creaky hinge, rusty with age. It feels like there’s a heavy weight on his chest. His skin is burning, and the pain in his leg is near as bad as it was when he passed out.

He hears the book close, hears Dick set it on the nightstand beside the bed. “I thought reading might help.”

“’M not…” He winces. “Not in a coma. How long…?”

“A day and a half.”

It takes some effort to pry his eyes open, but Lew manages it. Sunlight is streaming through the window to his right, falling on his face and making his skin feel even hotter. Then, suddenly, Dick is there, leaning over him and placing his cool hand on Lew’s forehead.

“It was a black dog,” he says. “Got you pretty good. Took a chunk out of your thigh, and clawed up your shin. I stitched you up as best I could, but I think you’re fighting a little bit of an infection.”

Lew is too busy looking at him to answer. The sun is lighting his hair up bright red and making his skin look almost translucent, so his freckles stand out starkly—as do the dark circles under his eyes. He must not have been sleeping. Was he sitting by Lew’s bed reading the whole time? 

“If it gets any worse I’ll have to take you to the hospital,” Dick goes on, oblivious to Lew’s staring. “I know it’s dangerous, but—“

“Painkillers?” Lew interrupts.

“We have Percocet,” Dick says, “but I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea.”

If Lew had the energy to roll his eyes, he would. “Give me the drugs,” he croaks. “Please.”

Dick obediently retrieves the pills. He helps Lew hold up his head to swallow one with a sip of water. His fingers are gentle on the back of Lew’s neck, and Lew misses them when they are gone, has to stop himself from reaching out to take Dick’s hand. This isn’t the first time he’s been injured on the job, and it won’t be the last, but it’s the first time he’s felt so taken care of and safe. He tries to imagine if the situations were reversed, and it was Dick laid up with the ripped-up leg and a fever. He’s not sure he would do such a good job. He’s not sure he would be so calm.

“You should sleep more,” Dick says. Lew turns his head enough to see that Dick has pulled a chair up to the side of the bed, and that he’s sinking back into it now like he plans to keep his vigil. “It’ll help you get better.”

“Whatever you say, Doc.” Lew isn’t going to argue. He still feels like he could sleep for days. Then he remembers something—something important—and his hand darts out to catch Dick’s wrist. “Did you get it? The black dog? Did you kill it?”

Dick watches him carefully. “I did. As soon as I got you patched up as best as I could, I went back out. I didn’t want to leave you alone, but…”

“But you had to.” Lew sighs, relieved. He can deal with the embarrassment of being caught off guard as long as he knows Dick took care of it. The point of all of this, everything they go through, is so people less prepared than they are don’t end up dead. It’s comforting that Dick remembered that, even with Lew stuck in the motel room, incapacitated.

“You can keep reading,” Lew says. “If you want.”

He keeps his eyes open long enough to see Dick grin back at him and pick up the Bible again. It’s not exactly Lew’s choice of bedtime story, but it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s Dick’s voice reading it. 

_But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”_

—————

It’s a week before Lew can get out of bed, and another two weeks after that before Dick thinks they’re safe to move on. Lew started to go stir crazy after a couple days, so he’s glad to see the open road again, even if he can’t be behind the wheel and his leg starts to ache after a few hours in the car, even though he feels like dead weight, can’t move much, can’t run, can’t help Dick hunt.

But feeling useless isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is the way Dick comes into the room at night dirty and sometimes scratched up, his face alight with the satisfaction of a job well done. It’s how Dick will smile at him from the doorway and toss a bag of food into Lew’s lap before heading for the shower. It’s the fact that the best part of Lew’s day is when they sit on their separate beds, just a couple feet of space between them, and pick over their food and talk about work with the local news running in the background.

It’s that when he’s not hunting, Lew has time to think, and all he can think about is Dick. Dick saving his life. Him saving Dick’s life. Over and over and over again until one day, one of them won’t be there in time for the saving, and then Dick’s smile will be gone and the way he breathes in his sleep and the soft music he puts on while driving, music Lew doesn’t even _like_.

And then one night Dick doesn’t come back.

It’s not unusual for him to return in the wee hours of the morning, but usually he calls first. This time he doesn’t call. Lew watches the clock on the wall slide from 9:00 to 10:00, then 10:00 to 11:00. He shoots off a few text messages— _Where are you?_ and _Call me_ and _I swear if you’re dead I’ll find a way to resurrect you so I can kill you myself_ —but they all go unanswered. 

They are in Millinocket, Maine, where two families have been murdered in the past week. In both cases, the man of the house killed his wife and children, and in both cases the man was found dead the next day, floating face down in the river. Dick suspected demon possession, some hellspawn has been taking people out for a joyride, wreaking havoc for the hell of it, then leaving the meatsuit for dead. Demons aren’t particularly _easy_ to hunt, but they encounter them often enough that hunting them has become a kind of science. So Dick should have had it easy, even fighting alone. He should be back by now.

But by midnight, he still hasn’t called, and Lew can’t pretend he’s not panicking anymore. He gets dressed, grabs his gun, and walks out of the room with no plan and no thought in his head except _find him_.

Dick has the car, but Lew has a lifetime of pseudo-criminal behavior behind him. It takes him no time at all to jimmy open another car in the motel parking lot and hotwire it. He peels out of the lot in a screech of tires that’ll probably have the police waiting for him when he gets back, but he doesn’t have room in his screaming brain to care about that right now. If he finds Dick alive, he’ll happily go to prison for the rest of his life. And if he finds Dick dead—well. Then it won’t matter.

He tries to ignore the pain in his leg as he thinks over everything Dick told him about the case. Both men worked for the park service, so Dick headed to their headquarters tonight in hopes he’d find some clue as to who the next victim might be. If the demon was possessing people there and riding them home, maybe there would be sulphur in someone’s office, maybe some clue as to who would be next.

Dick couldn’t have ended up possessed himself—that much Lew knows. When he found out a couple months back that Dick had been working all this time with no protection against possession, he’d made Dick lay down shirtless in bed and had tattooed a devil’s trap over his heart himself with a sewing needle, just like his father had done to him when he was sixteen. Except not just like that at all, because Lew’s hands shook so much it took twice as long as it should have, and he was sure Dick could tell how his heart was racing. Dick had laid there placidly, his hands folded on his stomach, his eyes closed, the clench of his jaw the only evidence that he felt any pain. Lew kept sneaking glances at his mouth. 

The tattoo is cold comfort now. It will keep a demon from jumping into him, but it won’t keep one from killing him. Lew steps harder on the gas, gritting his teeth against the pain that shoots across his thigh, and tries hard not to imagine finding Dick dead somewhere, his body crumpled and thrown away like tissue paper.

The park service offices are in a long, faux-log cabin half obscured by pine trees. It’s shut up for the day, and a metal gate has been pulled across the entrance to the parking lot, but Lew finds the Camaro parked on the side of the road and pulls his stolen car up behind it. All he has is his gun and the knife tucked in his boot—no flashlight, no silver bullets, no holy water—but what choice does he have? He approaches the building anyway.

The front door opens when he pushes on it, but inside it’s dark and quiet. He takes a deep breath in through his nose and is relieved when he finds no obvious smell of iron or rotten eggs. Straight ahead, there’s a reception desk, and the soft glow from the computer screen tells him Dick was here recently, probably seeing if he could look through employee records. 

Lew decides to take a risk and calls out: “Dick?”

He listens, counting out five Mississippis in his head, but no one answers. 

Two short hallways branch out to the left and right, but when Lew looks down each, he sees no signs of life. No open doors, no lights. Did Dick come here, find nothing, and leave? Was he surprised by their demon and abducted? Lew hopes it’s not the latter, because that would mean he could be _anywhere_ , and Lew wouldn’t even begin to know where to look for him.

With his gun pointed out ahead of him, Lew starts down the hallway to the right. He opens the first door he comes to and finds a dark, empty office—two desks pushed against opposite walls, two filing cabinets, two bookshelves. The next door he opens reveals the same thing. When he gets to the end of the hall, he turns around and goes the other way. Another room, another boring office.

But then.

It’s just a dark smudge on the floor in the dark. At first Lew thinks it’s blood and his heart rate spikes, but as he gets closer, he realizes it’s not blood at all. It’s pale, slimy. It sends ice running through his veins.

Skin. It’s a pile of shed skin. They aren’t looking for a demon at all. They’re looking for a shapeshifter.

Or rather, _Lew_ is looking for a shapeshifter. If the fucking thing found Dick, there’s no way it left him alive. Lew thinks this, but doesn’t process it—just files the thought away with clinical precision and moves on to the next door in the hallway. Find the goddamn thing first, he thinks. Find it and kill it. Kill it slowly.

He kicks open the next door in an unnecessary display of force. This room is bigger and full of metal shelves holding rows and rows of binders. It looks like there’s been a struggle here recently, because some of the binders have been knocked to the floor, their laminated pages flung everywhere. 

And there’s a body on the floor.

Lew doesn’t need to get any closer to tell whose body it is. Even in the dark, he knows Dick’s silhouette by heart. Hell, he probably knows it _better_ in the dark. The shape of his nose. The curve of his shoulder. From where he’s standing, Lew can see the dark pool of blood spreading out from beneath his head, but he doesn’t want to get close enough to see the entry wound. He doesn’t want to get close at all. He wants to turn around and walk out of the room, walk out of the building, and keep walking until, until—

A hand comes down on his shoulder and he curses, jumps away. Turns around and nearly puts a bullet in—in Dick?

“Lew.”

Lew shakes his head. He doesn’t realize he’s been backing away until he collides with one of the shelves. When he looks down, Dick’s body is right by his ankle, its mouth gaping often as if in shock. But then he looks up, and that Dick—the one that’s still standing—looks shocked too.

“It’s,” the Living Dick says, “it’s a shifter. Not a demon, like we thought. I surprised it and we…”

There are no thoughts inside Lew’s head. Not a one. With his gun still trained on Dick, he reaches down into his boot and pulls out his knife, because it’s the only way to know, the only way to know which of them is _real_. The knife is silver, and shifters can’t abide silver. He kneels down, puts the knife on the ground, and gives it a push, sliding it over to come to a rest against Dick’s boots.

“Cut yourself,” he says. His voice doesn’t sound like his at all. It sounds harsh and rusty, like he’s the one that’s a corpse. “Cut yourself so I know it’s you.”

Dick stares him down for long enough that Lew fears he’s going to say no. He moves his finger to the trigger of his gun, but he isn’t sure he’s going to be able to shoot. Plus the bullets aren’t silver. He just gave Dick—Maybe-Dick—his only real weapon.

But then Dick bends down and picks up the knife. He sets it to the palm of his hand and drags it across his skin, and there’s no hiss or sizzle, just a cut, just plain old blood. Lew tries to speak, but he collapses instead.

The moment his knees hit the ground, Dick is there, one hand on his jaw and the other on his waist “Lew. Lewis,” he says. Why the fuck does _he_ sound so concerned? He’s the one that could have died. Almost died.

In lieu of answering him, Lew grabs him by the collar of his shirt and drags him in until their mouths collide.

It doesn’t feel like a first kiss. Dick is gentle, and his lips tremble, and his hand grips the back of Lew’s head like he’s never planning on letting go. It’s less like kissing and more like exchanging breath, their mouths brushing softly and briefly a handful of times before Dick pulls back just enough to rest their foreheads together. Only then does Lew realize he’s cradling Dick’s cut hand in both of his like a baby bird, like he feared it would get crushed between their bodies. He can’t bring himself to drop it.

“Let’s not split up again,” he whispers.

Dick breathes out through his nose. “Lew.”

“Shh, just…” He runs his fingers across Dick’s palm, smearing blood around and making him shudder. “Say okay.”

“Okay,” Dick says. He closes his hand, gripping Lew’s fingers tight. “Okay.”

—————

They don’t talk about it.

They don’t talk about it and they don’t talk about it, and they look at each other less, touch each other less. Dick doesn’t grab his elbow to steady him after a job well done. Lew doesn’t bend as low over Dick’s shoulder to read new bits of lore off the laptop screen. Hands stay in pockets or fiddle idly with guns and keys and pens. Lew sharpens his knife until it could probably cut a strand of hair in two.

Dick is giving him an out, and Lew knows it. And he hates that it probably seems like he’s taking that out. But that’s not what this is. This is fear, plain and simple. It’s yellow-bellied cowardice that Lew didn’t even think himself capable of until now.

If they do this, he thinks, they’ll be tempting fate.

—————

Their first job after Lew’s leg gets better is a haunted hospital outside Baton Rouge, an abandoned place that should have been condemned but instead serves as an illicit hangout for drifters and foolish packs of teenagers. It pops up on their radar when a couple high school students die there. Lew bets the place has racked up a few homeless bodies too, a few John and Jane Does in the morgue, but it’s the teenagers that land it in the news, of course. No one cares until the pretty young people die.

It’s the kind of job that Lew hates. The moment they push their way through the dusty front doors, the EMF meter goes crazy, and there’s a good chance they’re looking at ten or more ghosts in one place. They can’t dig up all those bodies—assuming there are even still bodies to dig up, and assuming they could find them all. If Lew were on his own, he probably wouldn’t even have come here. Or if he did, it would be to wave one of his fake badges in the faces of the local PD and tell them to get the building condemned, or else.

“What if we just set the place on fire?” Lew grumbles. 

To his surprise, Dick seems to consider that for a moment, his eyes skimming across the cracked walls, the cobwebby ceiling. “We can’t,” he says at last. “Too many trees around. We could start a wildfire.”

“What do you suggest then?”

“Something more controlled.” Dick takes a few steps forward and shines his flashlight down the hallways that branch off from the entrance. “We find everything that might have some connection to these spirits—bedding, any belongings that might have been left behind—and burn that.”

“It’ll be dangerous,” Lew says.

Dick turns around and gives him a long look. “Do I need to remind you of that scar on your leg? Everything we do is dangerous.”

“Not everything we do is unknown-number-of-ghosts-in-an-old-building-that-could-fall-down-around-our-ears levels of dangerous.”

Sometimes Lew hates the way Dick can give the impression that he’s rolling his eyes without actually rolling them. And sometimes he hates that he can read Dick this well at all. His chest flutters at the suggestion of a grin on Dick’s lips, and he spends too many moments staring at his mouth and remembering how it felt against his.

“You’re welcome to wait for me outside,” Dick says.

Lew jerks his gaze upward to meet Dick’s and scowls. “Fat chance.”

He won’t let Dick split up with him either. It would be faster if they could search the rooms separately, but Lew is not over the incident with the shapeshifter (will _never_ be over the incident with the shapeshifter), and he’s not letting Dick out of his sight under circumstances like these. So they work their way from room to room together, gathering up anything that looks like it could have dead-person DNA on it—mattresses, rotted hospital gowns, piles of old clothing that probably belonged to vagrants. They lug everything out to the entryway, where there’s enough space to build and control their little bonfire. It takes an interminable number of trips and they are both sweating and huffing by the time they make it to the third room.

“Too bad we didn’t bring a wheelbarrow,” Lew grouses.

Almost as soon as the complaint comes out of his mouth, something slams into his chest and throws him backward into a wall, knocking the air out of his lungs. The spectre materializes between him and Dick, its bony fingers reaching for Dick’s throat. It’s a man, his hair long and matted, his manic smile revealing blackened, chipped teeth. Lew can only watch, dazed, as the ghost flickers in and out, approaching Dick with jerky, shuffling steps. Dick scrambles backward as he fumbles for the shotgun that’s strapped to his shoulder. He lifts it just in time to put two barrels’ worth of rock salt bullets through the ghost, making it dissipate into thin air.

“You okay?” Dick asks as he rushes to Lew’s side, putting a hand to his head like he has a fever rather than a few bruises.

“I’m fine,” Lew croaks. He pushes Dick off and slowly climbs to his feet. “Should’ve known we were having too easy a time of it.”

“There’s a tire iron in the bag I left out in the reception area,” Dick says. “Go get it.”

Lew obeys unthinkingly, jogging there and back again so Dick isn’t left alone too long. From then on, they work even slower. Now Dick is left to carry things alone while Lew moves around him in a protective circle, tire iron brandished. Iron doesn’t kill ghosts, but it does repel them for a while, and it’s the only option they have until they get their bonfire built. Every now and then a brave spirit materializes in the room, and Lew takes a swing and watches it disappear with an enraged shriek. The hair on the back of his arms stands on end. All the air in the hospital seems to crackle with electricity, and it only gets worse the longer they work, until Lew swears he can _hear_ it humming.

“We gotta get out of here, Dick,” he says as they finally make their way to the second floor. “Whatever’s in here, we’re pissing it off.”

“Yeah, I’m aware.” His tone is clipped, but he reaches out and gives Lew’s shoulder a squeeze. It’s a comforting, grounding touch—the kind of touch they haven’t been sharing a lot lately. “We’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

The way Dick says it, it’s hard not to believe him. Lew feels like he’s been infused with a second wind.

This floor goes more quickly, now that they’ve got their system in place. Every now and then Lew dares to leave Dick alone for a couple minutes so he can chuck things down the stairs. One time, while he’s out of the room, he hears Dick’s gun go off, but when he sprints back, Dick is calmly rifling through a filing cabinet as if nothing happened. “I got it, Lew,” he says. “You can breathe.”

Breathe. That’s a concept. It’s hard to breathe in this dingy hellhole anyway, with spiderwebs wafting on invisible breezes in every corner of every room, great chunks of plaster crunching under his feet, cockroaches skittering out of the beams of their flashlights. One of the rooms on the second floor is a nursery, and Lew finds a one-eyed teddy bear tucked in the corner of one bassinet and thinks this is something straight out of a nightmare. Every tiny sound makes him whirl around, holding his tire iron aloft.

By the time they heave the last mattress on top of their pile of junk, every muscle in Lew’s body aches and he feels like his shirt is permanently plastered to his skin. Dick has dirt all over his face, and he puts his hands on his knees while he catches his breath. Before he can stop himself, Lew reaches out and lays his hand on the back of his neck.

Dick grits his teeth. “This was a stupid plan, wasn’t it?”

“I feel like I’ve been beaten with a sledgehammer,” Lew says, giving Dick’s neck a firm squeeze, “but no, it was a smart plan.”

Dick straightens up and looks at him. Lew lets his hand fall away. If the air is crackling now, he doesn’t think it’s because of the ghosts.

Together they squeeze lighter fluid and shake salt over the mountain of trash. Dick strikes a match and tosses it on the pile, and the whole thing goes up in a blaze of heat that has them both reeling backward. As dry and old as it all is, it won’t take long to burn, which is good—Lew feels dead on his feet and can’t wait to have a shower and climb in bed. They walk around the edge of the blaze, making sure no other debris is close enough to catch and let the fire spread, then retreat to the wall not far away to watch it. 

“We should take a little break after this,” Dick says, and though Lew hears his father’s voice in his head telling him great hunters don’t take breaks, he nods and grunts his assent. He’s not sure he’ll be able to move for a couple days anyway.

“Hey, Lew?” 

Lew has had his head tipped back against the dirty wall behind him and his eyes shut, but he opens them now and looks at Dick. “Mhm?”

“I, uh.” Now that Dick has his attention, he looks away, down at his hands, and picks at his dirty cuticles. “I want you to know I appreciate this. You working with me these past months.”

Oh, shit, Lew thinks. This is it. The moment Dick tells him it’s time to split up. “ _You_ appreciate it? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I do,” he says, meeting Lew’s eyes again. “We’re better together, right? Safer. Smarter.”

It’s Lew’s turn to look away now. He looks back at the fire. Above it, the air shimmers, either with heat or dying ghosts. A spectral shriek echoes from somewhere upstairs, making him shiver. 

“Smarter?” he asks at last.

“Come on. You’ve saved my life more times than I can count already. And—now prepare your ego for this—I’m pretty sure I’ve saved yours a few times too.” Dick grins, a brief flash of teeth, and Lew can’t help but grin too. “Sometimes I’m not sure how I…how I did this before.”

Lew can relate to that. He has no idea either, and that’s the scary part. If this is going to end, how will he go back to the way things used to be?

“You trying to tell me something, Winters?” he asks gruffly.

Dick touches the back of his hand, a gentle brush of his fingers. “After…the thing in Maine. With the shapeshifter. You made me promise we wouldn’t split up again.” Lew makes a sound of protest, but Dick plows on. “I just need you to know that I have no plans to go anywhere. Not unless you want me to.”

Lew can’t look at him. He scuffs the toe of his boot in the dust on the ground and clears his throat, trying to find the right words to say. They’re both distracted for a second by another ghostly moan, this time accompanied by a streak of blue light that flies down the stairs, circles the fire, and then fizzles out of existence. 

“You might not have plans to go anywhere,” Lew says slowly, still staring at the flames, “but in this line of work, there’s no guarantee that you won’t end up leaving anyway.”

“Dying, you mean?” Dick snorts, as if that’s funny. When Lew shoots him an irritated look, he palms the side of Lew’s face to keep his head turned toward him. “There’s a lot less chance of that if you’re around to watch my back, don’t you think?”

It’s infuriating, how he can crack Lew right open like that, say the very thing that needs saying. The thing that makes all Lew’s fears seem silly and small in the face of the other emotions coursing through him. 

This time, when Lew presses their mouths together, it’s not gentle. He pulls Dick in by the back of his neck and kisses him bruisingly, like this is his last chance to remind him what their life together would be like—painful and violent and largely out of their control. His fingers slide under Dick’s sweat-damp t-shirt and splay against his skin in an effort to make his intentions clear. He wants everything. If he’s going to let himself fear for Dick and for himself every day of his life for as long as it lasts, he needs to know that Dick feels what he feels, wants what he wants.

And evidently Dick gets the message, because he surges forward and pins Lew to the wall and takes advantage of his gasp to lick into his mouth like he’s been waiting to do it for ages. It should be weird, kissing like this in a _place_ like this, but Lew forgets where they are almost immediately, even as his jacket snags on the ragged drywall behind him and his feet scuff loudly against the grit on the floor, even as the last groans of vengeful spirits fill his ears. A ghost could fly through him right now, and he wouldn’t notice. He hangs onto Dick and kisses him back, tasting salt on his upper lip, smelling sweat and dirt and smoke and not caring, because all of it is somehow perfect. 

“You’re an idiot,” Dick says between kisses. “Could’ve been doing this from the beginning.”

Lew jerks his head back so fast he clunks it against the wall behind him. “Not an idiot,” he grumbles half-heartedly. “Just…it’s complicated.”

Dick pushes the fingers of one hand into Lew’s sweaty hair and smiles at him. “Doesn’t feel complicated from where I’m standing.” 

It’s tempting to reverse their positions and kiss Dick breathless, so he can’t say things like that and make Lew’s heart leap inside his chest anymore. But they can’t let their guard down yet, not with the fire still burning and the possibility of malicious spirits still hanging over their heads. Instead Lew tucks himself up under Dick’s arm and rests his head on Dick’s shoulder while they watch the pile of bedding and clothing burn down to ashes.

“Don’t you ever worry though?” Lew asks at last, because he’s not sure he’s convinced by Dick’s cavalier attitude. “Not a lot of longevity in this job.”

“Honestly?” Dick rubs absently at Lew’s shoulder. “Honestly, I really don’t. I think life’s too short no matter what you do with it, and I’ve never wanted to waste mine worrying about things I probably can’t change.” He glances at Lew and then looks away again. “In my experience, a lot of hunters are lonely, and they bring that loneliness on themselves. I don’t want to be one of those people.” 

Lew thinks about his dad, who drove his mother away with his inability to stop obsessing and take care of his family. He thinks about Ron and Carwood, and about the fact that even though Dick has been doing this hunting thing for a lot less time, he somehow has a lot more friends in the business. 

“I guess…I don’t want to be one of those people either,” Lew says tentatively, like he’s testing out the concept. 

Dick doesn’t respond, just tugs him a little closer and absently kisses his temple, and that seals it somehow. No going back. They’re decided.

After every last dying ember is stomped out, Lew checks the EMF reader again and finds that, though the needle still moves a little, it’s hardly screaming at them like it was when they first walked into the place. That’s good enough for them. On the way out, they chain up and padlock the door as one last line of defense. A determined person with bolt cutters could get in, but hopefully it’ll at least keep the teenagers away.

Back at the motel room, they barely make it one step inside the door before Lew rounds on Dick and kisses him again, just to make sure he still can. And Dick lets him, dragging them both backward into the wall and slumping wearily against it while he struggles to keep up with Lew’s sudden desperation.

“We should…shower,” Dick says when Lew lets him come up for air, but Lew is shaking his head before the sentence even ends. 

“In a minute,” he says, and then, “Please.” Because it feels like this thing between them might disappear if he doesn’t nail it down right now. He’s worried one or both of them will change their minds. Dick will realize it’s a bad idea, or Lew will gather together enough willpower to go back to resisting. But Dick must sense how much Lew needs this, because he lets Lew sink to his knees, threads his fingers into Lew’s hair while Lew works his fly open. 

It’s sloppy and a little rushed. Dick is breathing hard, and his legs are shaking a little under Lew’s fingers, either from exhaustion or arousal or both. All Lew can taste is salt, and his neck aches before he really gets started, but it’s all worth it. Worth it for the way Dick looks down at him in disbelief, worth it for the strangled sound he makes as he spends himself down Lew’s throat, tugging involuntarily at Lew’s hair in the process and then tugging on purpose to yank him back to his feet for a kiss.

They crowd into the shower together after that, turning the water as hot as it’ll go. Dick washes dirt off the back of Lew’s neck and then skims his fingers over his bruises, too lightly to hurt but Lew flinches a little anyway. Once the water runs clear, they linger there, kissing under the spray, until their weary legs won’t hold them anymore. Then, they go back into the room and crawl into the same bed, and some time later, once his heart has stopped racing, Lew falls asleep with his head on Dick’s chest.

—————

On a desolate stretch of highway in North Dakota, Lew falls asleep in the passenger seat and wakes up some time later to find they’ve stopped moving. It’s disorienting at first, but he shifts around in his seat and sees that Dick has reclined his seat all the way back and is getting a much-needed nap himself. He looks relaxed, peaceful, his skin so pale in the moonlight he could have been cut from marble—but Lew knows if he reaches out and touches, Dick will be warm and soft and familiar and a hundred other things that Lew never thought he’d get to experience in this lifetime.

Trust Dick to be responsible enough to pull over and get some shut-eye, not run them off the road like Lew and his pride probably would have. It was easier to take care of himself when he didn’t have someone else to take care of too. He ran like a robot, eating mechanically, driving mechanically, stopping to rest when he needed to, but he knows that if he had Dick sleeping next to him in the car he might have tried to drive all night, his own body’s needs be damned. It’s dangerous, he thinks. It’s downright scary. He feels like he’s going to need so much time to learn how to live this way, how to care about someone this way.

As if he can sense Lew’s thoughts, Dick’s face scrunches up, and then his eyelids flutter and open. They look at each other for a beat. Dick smiles a little.

“Sorry,” he says. “Needed to rest for a while. I thought about climbing into the back, but.” He gestures at the barely-there back seat, which is home to a growing number of books and empty Styrofoam cups.

Lew frowns. “What’re you sorry for? Guess we should have found a room back at the last town.” He cuts his gaze toward the back seat. “Guess maybe we should think about getting a bigger car one of these days too.”

It pains him to consider giving up his baby, but he knows now that when he and Dick consolidated their belongings, he didn’t think it was going to be permanent. A few months maybe, and then Dick would ask him to drop him somewhere—at Ron’s or back at his family’s house. But here they are.

“If we do, we should store this one somewhere,” Dick says. “I wouldn’t ask you to give her up.”

“Pretty sure you asked me to do just that, once upon a time.”

That makes Dick’s mouth twitch. “That was different. I hadn’t fallen in love with her yet.”

Lew barks out a laugh that sounds too loud in the dark car, then reaches out to pat the center console, his fingers centimeters from Dick’s thigh. “She’s not too bad, huh?”

“Not bad at all.” His tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip. “We could, uh. We could think about getting property somewhere, you know. Maybe it’d be nice to have a home base. Someplace to go when we need a break.”

_Home base_ sounds a little bit too close to _home_ for Lew’s liking. His concept of home is a place where his father’s drinking problem got worse and worse the longer he hung around, a place where he and his sister at stale cereal in a dirty kitchen. A place where, each time he left it, he feared he’d never see it again.

“Do you ever think of getting out of this life?” he asks Dick, letting his fingers slide over a couple inches to rest on Dick’s leg. “Retiring, I mean?”

Dick grabs Lew’s hand and thread their fingers together. “Not yet,” he says. “I still have work to do. But if you wanted—“

“No.” Lew tightens his grip on Dick’s hand and shakes his head. “No, not yet.”

There’s a little sliver of gray on the horizon now, and soon the morning light will turn Dick’s hair into burnished gold. They’ll put their seats upright again, and Dick will wipe sleep from his eyes and put the key back in the ignition and set the engine purring. For hours, they’ll eat up the highway, headed to another job where they’ll probably end up fighting for their lives, for each other’s lives.

But for now they have nowhere to be, nothing to do but hold hands in the predawn. Maybe Lew can learn not to be scared of _home_ after all.


End file.
